Most conventional sheet printers, when printing on the front surface or back surface of sheets of print media, require a margin along all four edges. This conventional method prevents printing along the edge of such sheets of print media except by use of a secondary post-processing operation. Some conventional printing systems will print in a post-processing step from the side of a stack of sheets, so as to print some type of edge marking along those sides.
Other conventional sheet printers will print along the surface of a sheet of print media, and a later trimming step will be performed to allow some of the printed material to end up in a position right along the edge of the sheet. Of course, in such printing systems, the “edge portion” of the printed material is positioned along a “trimmed edge.”
Still other conventional sheet printers can print on the surface of a sheet of print media near the edge of that same sheet of print media, however, many of those printers merely create linear bars or rectangles along the planar surface near the side edge, in some cases these are to have the appearance of a bar code. Such printers are not designed to allow graphic design images, or custom images to be printed along the edges of a stack of sheet media, so as to produce a pattern that creates a customized image or other type of graphic design image in the stack when viewed from the side of that stack.
Conventional printing presses that use flat “plates” or cylindrical rolls (with bent “plates”) are typically capable of printing at virtually all locations on sheets or on a continuous roll of print media, but these machines use very different structures and processes to create the “image data” on those plates or rolls. Most of them use single (or multiple) plates with physical holes in the plates for the printing ink to flow therethrough, to the print media. Moreover, such presses handle their print media in very different ways than sheet printers, such as a laser printer or ink jet printer.